Artwork story
About At the Seaside
The artist and artwork
William Merritt Chase painted At the Seaside around 1892 in oil on a canvas measuring twenty by thirty-four inches. Born in Indiana in 1849, Chase became an influential American painter and teacher. From 1891 through 1902 he directed the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art, which The Met identifies as the first plein-air painting school in the United States. He taught there two days each week and spent the remaining time painting and with his family. In this work, groups of women and children rest on a beach, probably beside Shinnecock Bay.
The world around it
The scene belongs to the late-nineteenth-century growth of summer leisure and outdoor painting on eastern Long Island, but the landscape was not an empty resort waiting to be discovered. Shinnecock artist Jeremy Dennis explains that Chase opened the school near the Shinnecock Indian Reservation on ancestral Shinnecock territory, more than 4,422 acres of which had been taken through an illegal 1859 transaction. Patron and artist Janet S. Hoyt devised Chase's employment as part of a real-estate venture intended to transform Shinnecock Hills into a summer destination. The Shinnecock Indian Nation continues to assert title to that land.
A detail to notice
Chase gives nearly half the canvas to blue sky and carefully shaped summer clouds, making weather and open air as important as the beachgoers. Pale dresses and parasols punctuate the low strip of sand and suggest genteel leisure, yet most faces remain too distant to read. One figure may be Chase's wife, Alice Gerson Chase: The Met's record for an earlier portrait of Alice says she also appears in At the Seaside. That personal connection makes the scene feel like family life, while Dennis's account changes how its spaciousness reads. The same shore can hold an intimate summer memory, a lesson in plein-air painting, a real-estate advertisement, and the unresolved history of Shinnecock land at once.
Look closer: materials, scale, and subjects
The recorded object is painting made in Oil on canvas and held in The American Wing.
Recorded dimensions include 20 × 34 in. (50.8 × 86.4 cm).
Subject terms include Beaches, Seascapes, and Summer. Treat them as guideposts, not a complete interpretation.
Collection history and public-domain source
The collection credit line is Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967.
The individual artwork page and official image were verified as Public Domain on 2026-08-23.
No Context Gallery independently uses the public-domain image. The source museum has not endorsed, sponsored, or affiliated itself with these products.
Research sources
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